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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {